Word: clintonized
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There was a similar unveiling in 1992. Like Obama, Bill Clinton campaigned for the White House on a platform of middle-class tax cuts and a free-market-friendly approach to public policy. The government doesn't "spend" tax money in the New Democrats' lexicon. It "invests" in the future. And like Obama, Clinton saw another version of himself painted by the opposition: a pot-smoking, war-protesting, bureaucrat-loving, income-redistributing radical...
When the voters called for the "real" Clinton to take office, he stumbled. His transition team was disorganized. He abandoned his tax cuts and worried about the bond market instead. He pitched into a needless controversy over gays in the military. His crime-fighting proposals were drowned out by his difficulty in finding an Attorney General who had paid all her taxes. He antagonized the White House press corps and seemed unsure in his dealings with the Democrats who ran Congress. He took his eye off the ball overseas and let a police action in Somalia turn into a national...
Obama is eager to avoid those mistakes. Within weeks of capturing the nomination, he started planning for the possibility that he would govern. He set up a transition team last summer, led by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, one of the best-connected - and least self-aggrandizing - Democrats in Washington. Podesta's team is compiling a book of perhaps 50 chapters to use as a blueprint for a new Administration. All this activity opened Obama to criticism from McCain that he was prematurely "measuring the drapes" of the Oval Office. Instead of drapes, though, the Illinois Senator seemed...
...itself. The sale of carbon-emission permits would raise billions of dollars, money Congress could then disperse in the form of grants for alternative-energy research, tax credits for greening homes and businesses, and loans to retool inefficient industries - starting with Detroit's struggling automakers. Republicans doomed a Clinton-era attempt to do something similar by christening the plan a "carbon tax." For Obama to succeed, he would have to convince the public that this tax is truly an "investment...
...life," and many congressional Democrats share that zeal. Obama will have to decide whether, in the midst of a recession, Washington can take on two reforms of such historic proportions simultaneously. If, as the early betting predicts, he says no, Obama risks disappointing the liberal base - including Hillary Clinton supporters who were late joining his bandwagon and remain perilously close to the exits...